A Cerara Story
by youthfulninja
Summary: Cerara, leader of A.I.R. Anti-Invasion Rebellion regrets creating the rebellion after something happens to her beloved cousins Giroro and Garuru.


Thunder rumbled in the distance. Cerara looked down at the photo, clutching it between her small pink hands. "Oh… Why did it have to change?" She couldn't hold back any longer; huge shiny teardrops fell from her face like rain, plopping onto the glass of the image in the same pitter patter like fashion. "W-why…. Why?" Cerara let out a mournful wail, like the wolf under the full moon.

Why couldn't she have left everything alone? Why had she felt the need to change something, be a part of something bigger? "Ha…," tears streamed faster down her coral pink face, soaking her aqua blue scarf bluer than it already was. "What was I thinking… Like I could actually make a difference in the world… You foolish dreamer Cerara, you fool…." She rubbed her wet, perplexed reflection against the glass of the photo, holding is close to her and never letting go. The tears streamed down faster now; her whimpers and held back chatters evolved into long hick-upped sobs, singing in motion with her shaking.

"Giroro ni-san… Garuru onee-san…" Over and over.

Maybe if she had not started A.I.R., they would still be alive.

"Cerara... I want you to tell me the truth," Giroro looked straight on into Cerara's eyes, his serious expression enough to scare even someone used to it.

"I would never lie to you Ni-san! You know that." Cerara challenged back, giving her best dead-on stare straight back at her beloved cousin.

"Then tell me the truth, once and for all! If not for my sake, or Garuru's, then for Natsumi's!" he glared at Cerara, "What in the hell did you get her and yourself into? Challenging the government! Did you think I did not know?"

Cerara's face drained of all color, her eyes glued open like two blue Frisbees. Ni-san… knew? How? "W-what are you talking about?" She tried to maintain her composure. This wasn't good; her entire guard was thrown off. In all the training exercises she had taken, none of them could have prepared her for the fact that Giroro and Garuru knew. For how long had they had known what she was up to? How?

"You know damn right what I'm talking about! What I want to know is, what the frog is this?" Giroro held up a rough photo gripped between his maroon fingers, printed on computer paper from Kururu's lab.

Cerara's mouth opened closed like a fish, finding no way of saying any of the thousands of things that swam through her mind at that very second.

The image was a picture picked up on a security camera, one she and her rebellion patrol had clearly missed, of five pure white keronians dressed in pure white cloaks of the same color running down the halls of the A.R.M.P.I.T. Platoon base. You could not see their faces, but if one had studied the movements and stances of each cloaked character and matched it to a familiar one, say, comparing different images, it would be easy to identify who they resembled. Not only that, the group of five keronians ran down the halls with such precision and accuracy it would seem they had been there their whole lives. They had not been careful enough.

She was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Cerara had no intentions of lying to her beloved Ni-san, or to anyone else in matter, but the fact that knowing would put Giroro and Garuru in danger was a risk she was not willing to take. But the fact that they already knew… That fact in itself would put them in danger, let alone the rest of her comrades in A.I.R. She had had no intention of letting Natsumi know about her organization either, but when Natsumi suspected something before even her cousins had, she had snuck onto Cerara's ship the Hummingbird and infiltrated the main base. Cerara had no choice but to tell her. This situation… this situation was no different. She had to tell Giroro, for good or for bad.

Cerara looked down at the ground and took a silent deep breath in, swallowing all her fears and replacing them with her game face. When she looked up, Giroro was standing confidently waiting intently for a response, his arms crossed with a matching expression.

"You know, it is very dangerous that you know any of this," she said strongly. Her entire posture was taller, more confident and deviant, and with her scarf blowing in the wind she seemed like a force to be reckoned with. No longer did she appear to be the bubbly, cheerful pink keronian girl that everyone knew and loved; No, she had become someone most of the people outside of A.I.R., her close friends, and her cousins almost never saw. In that sweet girls place stood a warrior, a female trained in anything and everything imaginable to live up to her own expectations and her family's without killing a single living thing, and who's entire being meant business.

"It's been a while since I've seen that look on your face." Giroro remarked smartly back, a small deviant grin willing itself to appear on his face, his anger subsiding to the burst of pride he felt at seeing that rare soldier side his cousin seldom revealed she even had.

"Touché, cousin, "Cerara chuckled. Giroro had a right to be a bit stunned, although he had often seen that look on her face when she went for training rounds with him, the little time she had been able to see him was often spent without it. "Where did that extra security camera come from?"

"Ahh, you liked that did you? I had Kururu set it up after you left. I've been having some suspicions for a while now," Giroro closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. "You don't know how much it hurt seeing they were true."


End file.
